At the start of the summer it is always a good idea to pick on a salad that will be the default salad for next few months. The one you know that will be good and will go well with whatever might have been thrown on the barbeque.

In previous years it has been a chickpea salad and a roast aubergine salad. This year we seem to going for a Turkish chopped from the Morito cookbook.

It is a mixture of cucumber, radishes, cherry tomatoes and red onion all chopped up into small chunks and stirred together with some finely chopped parsley, mint and rocket. The seasoning comes from half a dozen pickled Turkish peppers, a squashed clove of garlic, lemon juice and olive oil.

We had it on Thursday night and we are having it again tonight with lamb chops cooked on the barbeque, yogurt and flat bread.

This Monday evening we had the remains of the best part of a roast chicken to finish off.

We ate it with fried potatoes, salad from the garden and a pungent green dressing cribbed from a Diane Henry book.

The dressing was made up of all the anchovy fillets I could find in the fridge (a total of five – a couple extracted from a jar and the rest from a couple of opened tins), a small handful of capers, a small bunch of parsley, basil and mint, a couple of cloves of garlic and the juice of a lemon. This was all put into a blender and as I pulsed it I poured in enough olive oil to turn it into a thick sauce. It didn’t need salt but I stirred in a few grinding of pepper.

To eat the salad was put on a plate, followed by the the potatoes and chicken. The sauce was slathered on top.

It was pungent enough to cheer up a grey and wet evening.

Sunday evening and the weekend has gone again and in a few hours I will be waking up and it will be Monday morning again. In a way you have to feel sorry for for Monday mornings – a day of the week lumbered with all the misery of a trudge back to work. Almost as bad as a Tuesday afternoon half way through February.

So the weekend done what has been cooked.

Friday evening was a tray of pork ribs. There wasn’t time to marinade them. It was just a case of come home, make up the sauce, slather it over and put them in the oven for an hour forty minutes. The sauce was one of those things that worked but no attention was paid as to what went in apart from knowing there was a good squirt of Heinz Tomato Ketchup, along with the last of the soy sauce.

It went down well – the youngest daughter and I pulling at the pieces of bone with our teeth. We had them with sliced tomatoes, onions and doritos.

Saturday night was pizza night. There was a request that one should have nothing else on it but caramalised onions but for the other two I was left to myself. In the event the caramalised onions ended up with a few slices of ham on top and the rest of us had them with a smear of cooked tomatoes, onions and ham and sausage.

For all the effort put into the pizzas the highlight for those eating were the dough-balls. the small pieces of dough pushed to one side and then rolled round my fingers before going into the hot oven and then eaten with a smidgen of melted butter.

Sunday and I followed back to to the brined chicken wings I had on Thursday lunchtime. This time I was working with a whole chicken and I steeped it water that had been boiled with a mixture of sugar, salt, orange juice and pith and, most important of all, bay leaves.

Truth be told the bay didn’t come through as strongly as I had hoped but it was still pretty good.

Before the chicken we had a dozen asparagus spears with a couple of barely hard boiled duck eggs.

The duck eggs were almost the highlight of the weekend.